It's been a decade since Mike Patton parted ways with Faith No More, the influential rock act he fronted
through most of the '90s. Since the band's break-up, the versatile singer has
continued to explore pop and experimental music. A serial collaborator, Patton
has logged studio time with contemporaries as diverse as Björk, The Melvins,
and Bebel Gilberto. Patton's affection for noise (his record Adult Themes For
Voice is a harrowing 34-track
collection of screams, squeals, and grunts) has drawn attention from
unpredictable sources; the singer was tapped by the producers of I Am Legend to provide the sound effects for the movie's
nocturnal beasties. As part of The A.V. Club's four-part interview series exploring the
intersection of music and videogames, Patton talks about his work in Portal and Bionic Commando and questions why anyone would want to listen to Mr.
Bungle—video game samples or no.
The A.V. Club: In
February you recorded a voice session for Bionic Commando. You play the game's lead Nathan Spencer. Could you talk a little bit about
how that came about?
Mike Patton: To be honest, I don't know! The phone rang. I'd done
a couple other voiceover sessions for other games, and I think that the Capcom
people heard what I did and liked it. That was basically it. I remember the
original game, and I was like, "Oh, man, this could be fun." It was pretty
intense. Previously my videogame work was more sound effect-oriented or less
character, less script-oriented. This was much more voice acting.
AVC: The guy's
basically a bionic human. Though Grin, the developer, did hint that you might
utilize some of your other talents.
MP: Yeah, I did some sound effects stuff. Actually,
about a week ago, I did a make-up session where, basically… The first couple
sessions I did was just reading lines, and a little bit of screaming here and
there. But I just did a make-up session where they were getting into the latter
stages of the game, and lines have changed and things like that. It was much
more sound effect type work. Like, "Imagine yourself falling from a 30-story
building. Now imagine yourself tripping. Now imagine yourself getting hit by a
lead pipe in the head." And, you know, kind of improvising on the fly. That was
pretty fun.
AVC: How does working
on videogame voiceovers differ from, say, your work on I Am Legend?
MP: Well, I Am Legend was basically me screaming my balls off for four
hours and not knowing what they were going to do with it. There was no script,
no lines I had to read. It was basically a big screen in front of me, and
they'd play a scene once, and I'd kind of memorize the action and then
improvise. So in some ways, that was more like doing a vocal improv. The other
stuff I've done has been much more scripted. You'd say one line, like, "I'm
going to the store," and you'd say it 10 different ways. With I Am Legend basically I was doing much more sound design type of
work.
AVC: You also had a
brief appearance in Portal,
the Valve game, and there's talk about you perhaps appearing in their game Left
4 Dead.
MP: I think what they did is they took some material
that I'd already recorded for Portal—maybe it was vice versa. Basically that came out of the same
session of work.
AVC: How did that come
about? Is that another situation where you got a call out of the blue?
MP: Sort of. I knew someone who worked for the company
that was working on the music there. He mentioned me to the producers, and I
guess their eyes lit up and they thought, "What the hell?" I think that most of
this work that we've been talking about came from the first videogame I did,
called The Darkness, where I was
just doing, well, the darkness! Imagine what that sounds like! And it was a
semi-high-profile game and I guess there was enough publicity behind it that
people knew I was involved. Basically the Valve stuff came from—it was an
inside job. A friend of mine recommended me. Same with I Am Legend. I don't have many contacts in that world. I guess
I'm getting to the age where a lot of other people my age have real jobs, and
when they're hard-up they refer to an old-timer like me.
AVC: A lot of your work
has shown an interest in film soundtracks, and it's been said that you're an
avid gamer. How do you compare the kind of soundtracks that are happening in
films versus the kind that are happening in games right now? Do you think games
are matching movies?
MP: Not at all. I think that much more could be done
with game soundtracks. I think that, for the most part… I'm not a real
authority on the matter. From what I've heard, videogame
soundtracks—obviously there's less budget and all of that—it just
seems like game soundtracks are farmed out among friends. And it seems like
more of an afterthought. It's a videogame. It's much more background. To me, a
lot of that stuff seems much more derivative. "Do a John Williams. Do an Elmer
Bernstein." That kind of approach. Whatever's happening at the moment. But
obviously, I'm sure there are exceptions. That's not to say it doesn't happen
in film, either. I just think that there's more of a margin for error in
videogame scoring.
AVC: You've been doing
a couple of scores for some films and some shorts. Is that something you're
hoping to do more often?
MP: I'd love to. It's a new challenge and something
that's been a part of my musical language for a while, so I think that I can
handle it. Again, it's all about finding a director who might want to take a
chance on someone like me, and those are pretty few and far between. So far
what little scoring work I've gotten has been through friends. And that's
wonderful because so far I've been able to do exactly what I've wanted. Who
knows where it'll lead? But it is definitely something that I'd like to do more
of. I'm getting up there. I'm, like, 40 now, and I definitely see a light at
the end of my touring tunnel, so to speak. And right now, my livelihood is kind
of going out and playing a show in Serbia or playing a festival in
Amsterdam—I'm going in a couple days. So, looking in the crystal ball,
film's going to be a really nice way of getting to stay at home a little more
and still be very creative and busy.
AVC: Would you prefer
to do more experimental music in soundtracks for a game or a movie? Or is your
interest in whatever kind of music is suitable for a film, if the movie calls
for more traditional music? Is that the kind of thing that you're interested
in?
MP: I'm interested in trying anything at this point. I
don't have any agendas. If someone were to hire me for a film they'd be getting
a certain kind of package, that's for sure, a certain set of tools. But I would
listen to the director. I would ask what they want, and if they said, "Make me
a rap-metal track," I'd probably say, "Hey, you got the wrong guy!" But beyond
that, I would be all ears and try to do my best. That's not say I'd be perfect
for every job. I think that you have to choose wisely. I know where my bread is
buttered, and for the most part, I'm better off doing my own thing. This is
just kind of a bonus and a detour and a new challenge for me.
AVC: There an Ennio
Morricone project at Ipecac, a compilation.
MP: Yeah, maybe two, three years ago we did a two-CD set
called Crime and Dissonance. It's
great. You gotta hear it. It's more, for lack of a better word, "out" kind of
stuff. It's really not the western stuff, not the stuff that everybody knows.
The guy is so incredibly prolific. There's stuff on this comp from TV things
that he did. He did pop arrangements for very popular singers in the '60s and '70s,
really colorful arrangements. The guy was really multi-faceted, and this comp
kind of shows a little more of his hidden side. This is, like, psychedelic
guitars, sitars, distorted electronic stuff. I think that a lot of people would
put it on and go, "Who is this? Is this Os Mutantes or something?" It's a
lesser-known side of his work.
AVC: Was that a matter
of you going through your collection and picking out the stuff that you thought
expressed a different side of him that people weren't familiar with?
MP: A little bit. I'm a big fan of his. And let's just
say you walk into a record store—it's daunting when you look in his
section, so many fucking releases, and then re-releases and compilations.
Basically I felt that most of them culled from similar sources. When the
opportunity presented itself to do a Morricone comp, I was really excited, but
then I thought, "I don't want to do another one of those." This guy Alan Bishop from the Sun City Girls, he's
a big Morricone scholar. He put together a big list of things, and we went
through them together and basically chose what to put on there. And it was a
matter of licensing and some of it was kind of difficult, and it took awhile to
put together. But ultimately, it's one of the releases we've put out that I'm
most proud of.
AVC: Going back and
listening to that first Mr. Bungle record on Warner Bros…
MP: Why?
AVC: Well, there's a
bunch of field recordings in there; there's a bunch of videogame samples or
just clips of videogames being played and vocal quotes. Were games just kind of
part of your pop-culture soundscape at the time?
MP: Yeah, definitely. I've always been a big pinball
guy, and I think there's at least four or five pinball sequences in there. "Ride
the Ferris wheel" from [pinball game] Earth-shaker. We were all into that at that point and playing
that stuff. It all came into the record. That was our first record, but we'd
been a band probably seven years before that. And every time Mr. Bungle made a
record there were several years in between, and there were a lot of things
going into that. Obviously it was whatever we were into at the time.
AVC: There are live
bootlegs of Mr. Bungle out there, from around '91, where you guys play a medley
of Super Mario Bros.
songs.
MP: Our first record was kind of a culmination of our
teenage years. It's all in there: pornography, videogames, death metal, and
then some other leanings that came to us later, like some sound design stuff
and a little bit of improv, some more compositional chops. Every record we made
basically summed up five or 10 years of frustration.
AVC: Cartoons were the
focus of the Fantômas album Suspended Animation. It's been said the record features uncredited
samples from game soundtracks. Do those pop in there or is it purely sounds
from animation?
MP: No, there's a gazillion samples, but none of them
are from games. They're almost all from cartoons, mostly Warner Bros. or
Hanna-Barbera stuff. And it was hours and hours of going through sound effects
records and different sound effects libraries trying to find the right "boing" or the right squeak. But none of that came from
videogames. That was more my take on the golden age of animation—cutting
and pasting and cells and pages turning really quickly.
AVC: Do you commonly
find yourself in the studio going through catalogs and catalogs of sounds,
looking for just the right thing?
MP: Happens every time I go into the studio. You may
hear a sound in your head and it'll take you a couple hours to find it, whether
it's a sample or goofing around on the guitar through, like, six pedals. To me,
finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is
kind of an instrument. I don't write things down on paper. I don't read or
write music in the traditional sense, so I have to figure it out on the fly
while I'm in the studio. Thank God technology has advanced to the point where
you don't have to be paying by the hour to figure those things out, whereas in
the past, everything was composed when you went into the studio because it was
costing you money. Now everyone has a home studio and you can kind of figure it
out in your pajamas.
AVC: Are there other
projects right now that center on those kinds of themes, like soundtracks or
animation? Does Crudo fall into that category?
MP: Yeah, that has a little to do with what we're
talking about. It's more of a pretty straight-up groove, party project.
AVC: That's with Dan
The Automator. And you were up in Seattle working on that?
MP: No, we recorded here in San Francisco. The record's
probably three-quarters of the way done. We got offered to play a festival up
in Seattle. We played the warm-up show here in San Francisco, and then went up
there and played the festival, and that was that.
[pagebreak]
AVC: How different is
this record from the one you made with Automator as Lovage?
MP: The only real similarity is that me and Dan are
involved. I would say that there's less of a kitsch angle to it. It's much
harder. It's not sleazy listening or anything like that. It's much more in the
pocket, kind of pop, rock, with some hip-hop stuff thrown in there. The only
other thing that I can really mention is a project called Mondo Cane, which is
something I'm doing. It's an Italian repertoire—my arrangements of '50s
and '60s Italian pop tunes, a lot of which were arranged by people like
Morricone, like I was saying before, some very cool, interesting arrangements.
I've done four concerts—about to leave in a couple days to do another
one. And the record should be out in early '09.
AVC: Is this similar to
the Morricone project in that you'd found a bunch of artists that you were
interested in and thought that they should be brought to light?
MP: Yeah, I lived in Italy for a number of years and I
was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about
Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the
'50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented
pop singers that weren't using pop bands. They were using orchestras. It was
really a creative time, and the results were really amazing. These records are
timeless. Really incredible voices working with maestros, like film composers
and really great arrangers, in some sense, kind of like what was happening with
Tony Bennett or Sinatra: incredible arrangers and just a really exciting
mixture or clashes of worlds. I was really into that music for a long time and
I just thought, well, at some point in my life I want to add my spin to this. A
couple years ago an opportunity presented itself to work with an orchestra over
in Italy, and I jumped on it. I figured this would be the time to do it, and so
far I've been really happy with it.
AVC: Were these folks
who were really familiar with this music? Had they grown up on it?
MP: Yeah. What I did was I put a band together, like a
10-piece band, and I rehearsed them to death. Most of them are people my age,
and yeah, they know this music very well or at least they know of it. What I
did was I twisted the arrangements up to kind of make them my own. This stuff
in some ways is kind of sacred and you don't just wanna karaoke it. You don't
want to just play it A to Z. It's an exciting prospect. So I did that and then
we found an orchestra there in central Italy. I had some friends write some
string arrangements and orchestral parts out for me. We did several shows
there, and now it's kind of growing beyond that. We're working with local
orchestras in different countries.
AVC: Do you think we'll
see this project or Crudo appearing at the All Tomorrow's Parties that you're
curating?
MP: Doubtful. The thing about Mondo Cane is that it's
incredibly expensive. When I got asked to curate All Tomorrow's Parties with
The Melvins, it was like, well, I can do this, this, this, and that, but I
don't want to suck up the budget. I don't want to shoot myself in the foot. But
to me it was more about putting something together as opposed to showcasing my
stuff. I thought of it more as an opportunity to hire people and present people
who may not have a chance. Or at least in a festival like that, which kind of
tends to lean on the experimental/indie rock side, for lack of a better word. I
really strove to put together a list of people that were coming from a
completely different perspective, like some modern classical composers, a lot
of world music, obviously some stuff from Ipecac, and one or two projects of
mine, and leave it at that.
AVC: Is that locked
down?
MP: Not yet. I submitted a list and they're still
chasing everybody down. There's been a few people confirmed so far, but I'm not
really sure who they are. It still remains to be seen who is going to
materialize and who isn't.
AVC: Did you and Buzz [Osborne of Melvins] talk about
that and hash it out together, or did you create your lists separately?
MP: We did two separate lists and then compared them
because there were some repeats. I'm not worried about the two sides not
meshing. I think that the more variation the merrier.
AVC: That's been a
long, healthy relationship, between you and the Melvins.
MP: We've known each other for a number of years, but I
think that the real first time we joined forces was when I started Ipecac. It
was just kind of a crazy idea at the time because I had few releases that I
didn't know what to do with. I was very nervous about starting a new label. I
didn't want to go over my head. At the time me and my partner Greg started
asking friends, associates, coworkers, "If we did something like this, would
you be on board? What do you think?" We started putting out feelers and one of
the first people we called was Buzz. He said, "Oh my god. This is like a dream
come true. If you do this, we'll give you three records in your first year."
And, well, that was that. Who am I to say no?
AVC: Fantômas is coming
up on its 10-year anniversary. Is there still action with those guys?
MP: It's slowed down a little bit because we've gotten
distracted with other things, but I've started writing a new record. It's gonna
be a bit of a stretch for us. I want to try to make an all-electronic record.
I'm trying to figure out how to do that, the practicalities of doing that. So I
don't think it will be out probably for another year, but the band is still
very much in my mind.
AVC: Faith No More
appeared in Rock Band. Do
you have any kind of input on those kind of decisions when you're picked for a
game like that?
MP: Well, if we do, I certainly didn't know about it. I
didn't know about it until it was in the game. Some friends told me.
AVC: So it's one of
those situations where the label's just making these deals and they don't even
check with you guys.
MP: Yeah, when you're on a major, basically they own the
music and they can kind of farm it out however they want. And I do think there
was probably a courtesy call or something like that at some point in the
process, but I wasn't involved in it. You learn very early on just to step back
and put your hands up and say, "Whatever, whatever." There's nothing I can do.
AVC: Would you have
picked a different song to be in Rock Band?
MP: No, it doesn't matter to me. I had no agendas in
that regard. I mean I'm glad they used anything in the first place. Fine by me.
AVC: Many regard music
games as kind of silly. Do you see the appeal of those kinds of games?
MP: Sure. It's hard not to. Any idiot, any stockbroker
can get out there and live out a fantasy and pretend like he's playing music.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just recently did an
interview with a videogame magazine in which I walked into the room and they
had a whole Rock Band set-up and
wanted me to play. I'd never really done that. And I realized how un-musical it
really is. You play that guitar or that bass, and it has nothing to do with
music. But nonetheless, it was pretty fun. It made me wonder if, at some point
down the line, you could compose that way, because there's obviously a whole
generation of kids who have grown up on these games and using that method to
make music. What if you weren't just doing it for karaoke? If I was
11-years-old and I wanted to start a band using that technology, with screens
and that weird push-button, press the X here… It just made me wonder if there's
a whole generation of kids who couldn't do something like that.
AVC: MPC samplers would
make great videogame controllers. They could translate directly into that kind
of gameplay.
MP: Absolutely. All it is is pressing a pad here and
there. I mean this guy's making music on the fucking iPhone now. There's these
programs if you jail-break your iPhone where you can use drum machine programs,
all this kind of stuff. I don't know what this stuff sounds like, but the idea definitely hits me in the geek nerve, and I love it.
AVC: Eventually there's
going to be that kid who learned to play drums because he played Rock Band.
MP: Yeah, absolutely. But there should be a way for him
to actually not just play a Led Zeppelin song, to make music doing that.
AVC: Guitar Hero IV, the new game, is going to integrate some kind of
music creation tool.
MP: I knew it. It had to happen. I'm all for it, man. I
think it's great. I am no one to be a purist. I didn't go to school to learn
how to do this. I taught myself. If these kids are teaching themselves by
looking at a TV or doing it through a videogame, yeah, it's pretty sick, but
who am I to argue? If someone can do something creative with it, I'd buy it in
a second. I mean, would you go see a band of 10-year-old kids playing original
music on Rock Band? I would. I'm
not saying I'll like it, but I definitely would go see it.